Rather than a dual biography, this insightful book (originally titled Sons and Brothers) is a portrait of the relationship between John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert. Eight years apart in age, they were wildly different in temperament and sensibility, yet they influenced each other profoundly and their fraternal bond defined many of their decisions. A Kennedy scholar and the author of two histories on the Kennedy administration, Richard Mahoney gives us Jack and Bobby in all their hubris and humanity, youthfulness and fatalism.

"Writing in a steady, almost relentlessly elegiac tone, Mahoney proves that the lives and deaths of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy remain as compelling now as they were throughout the turbulent 1960s.... In 44 brief chapters, each a vignette chosen to illuminate how the brothers responded to events not as separate historical actors but as members of a family, Mahoney reveals the anger, even rage, that permeated the Kennedy years (exemplified by the implacable hatred between Bobby and the Mafia and between the Kennedys and Castro).... He portrays the brothers as figures out of a Greek tragedy brought both high and low by the force of their character."—Publishers Weekly